Share

Journal

Happy Mother's Day

Spent the day with Penn talking about the project we're working on. It's something we've been talking about doing for six years, and it's finally happening. Not that either of us now has the time to do it, but if we don't start it, it'll be another six years. Really enjoyable. And I just did one of those googles this evening on something Penn and I needed to know where you put the right two words together in the google and suddenly the information you needed falls out, and I Learned Something To My Advantage.

I am certain that this TV commercial for Soy sauce would be much less interesting if I could make sense out of it (cat-headed shrimps: why? the cat who hangs itself: why? the little girl who goes to bed with him at the end: why?) As it is, it becomes a zen cohen: what is the sound of one fish-headed soy-superhero clapping...?

Creative person meets a muse (either one of the nine classical Muses or a more individual muse) and interacts with them, usually by keeping them captive.

Which as many of you reading will know, was the story of Sandman #17, Calliope (May 1990)(It's collected in a book called DREAM COUNTRY). Now, I have a fairly good memory, and don't recall ever reading any captive-muse-for-someone-with-writer's-block stories before I wrote mine. (I'm not saying there couldn't have been any, just that it certainly wasn't around enough to have been any kind of meme, as far as I know.) So I wonder if it's a) Calliope just sort of edged out into popular consciousness, or, more likely, b) In Steam Engine Time People Build Steam Engines, and I just happened to build my particular steam engine first (I knew that if I didn't write a Serial Killer's Convention story someone would, for example; it was an idea whose time had come.)